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Max Pollak (1886 - 1970)

Biography

Max Pollak (b. Prague, Czechoslovakia 1886 - d. USA 1970) lived Vienna, Austria as a child and in 1902 studied at the Vienna Academy of Art under William Unger and Ferdinand Schmutzer. In 1912 he travelled to Italy, France, and Holland. During the First World War, he was appointed official painter of the Austrian Army and documented the stark landscapes of the places where his battalion was stationed. On December 4, 1924 he married Friederike "Friedl" Knedel; they emigrated USA in 1927. Pollak produced a series of colour aquatints of New York, Cincinnati, and Detroit. He held his first exhibition at the 57th Street Art Gallery in New York and he was commissioned by Theodore Dreiser in 1929 to illustrate his book, My City, reproducing eight of Pollak's colour aquatints of Manhattan. In 1938, he and his wife moved to San Francisco, California. Pollak was inspired by his new city and its environs and produced views of San Francisco neighbourhoods, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Sausalito. They also made frequent trips to Mexico and Guatemala in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s.He also made drypoint, aquatint, and soft ground etching prints. He also specialised in portraiture and, among his most famous was a 1914 portrait of Sigmund Freud at his desk surrounded by his antiquities.

Pollak’s graphic work comprises of over 500 prints for which he won numerous awards including the Chicago Society of Etchers prize in 1942, and the California Society of Etchers awards in 1942, 1944, and 1945. He exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939 and had numerous solo exhibitions, including a 1928 show in New York, a 1940 show at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and a 1973 exhibition at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara. He was a member of the Chicago Society of Etchers, the California Society of Etchers, and the Prairie Printmakers in Wichita, KS. Selected group exhibitions include: Urban International Exhibition of Artworks by Living Artists, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, April 13-17, 1912; Annual Exhibition of Art Union for Bohemia, Rudolfinum, Prague, April-May, 1913; Exhibition of the Association of Visual Artists, Secession Building, Austria Secession, Prague, January-February, 1914; Three Etchers in California: James McNeill Whistler, Max Pollak, Kathan Brown, Oakland Museum, May, 1982 (posthumous).

 

Details

Born:

Czechoslovakia

Nationality:

Czechoslovakian (1919 -1992), Austrian, American

Artworks by Max Pollak

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